Plenty of Linnworks sellers back into wholesale: a retailer asks to buy fifty units, then a distributor calls, and suddenly you are running a trade operation through a system built for marketplace retail. Linnworks can absolutely handle B2B alongside retail — but only some of it natively. This is the honest map: what the platform does out of the box, what you can bodge, and where you genuinely need an app.
1. Separate trade orders from retail: source and sub-source
Do this first, because everything downstream depends on it. Every Linnworks order carries a source and sub-source, and manually created orders let you set these yourself. Give trade orders their own sub-source — "TRADE" or "WHOLESALE" — and you can filter open orders by it, report on trade revenue separately, and route trade orders to their own processing rules. Skip this and your wholesale business is invisible inside your retail numbers forever. Native: yes, entirely. Cost: a naming convention and five minutes of discipline.
2. Trade pricing: the hard part
Here is the honest bit. Linnworks has one retail price per stock item and no native concept of customer groups, trade tiers or price lists. Channel pricing exists, but it varies price per marketplace, not per customer. Your realistic options, in ascending order of robustness:
- Manual override at order entry. Whoever keys the order types the agreed price. Fine for five trade customers; a consistency disaster at fifty.
- The spreadsheet price list. The default workaround, and it degrades predictably — version drift, missing new SKUs, stale costs. We dissect the failure modes in tiered pricing without spreadsheets.
- Tier prices in extended properties. Store one price per tier per SKU as extended properties on the stock item. Visible in Linnworks, exportable, readable by order tools. This is the right storage layer; maintained by hand it still lacks formulas and validation.
- A tier pricing engine that computes tiers from formulas and syncs them into those extended properties automatically. This is the gap our B2B Price Tiers app exists to fill.
3. Taking counter and phone orders
Trade orders rarely arrive through a marketplace. They come by phone, by email, or across a trade counter — and Linnworks' manual order screen was not built for speed. It is workable: search the item, add the line, override the price (from whichever price list you trust), set the sub-source, repeat. But keying a forty-line trade order this way, cross-referencing a spreadsheet for every price, is slow enough that errors creep in.
This is the second place apps earn their keep. A dedicated trade order screen — such as Trade Order POS — gives you fast SKU entry against Linnworks stock, pulls the right tier price automatically for the customer you have selected, and drops a properly sub-sourced order into Linnworks. Counter sales in seconds rather than minutes, with pricing that matches the list every time.
4. Minimum order values
Most wholesalers set a floor — £150, £250 — below which trade pricing is not worth the handling. Linnworks has no native minimum-order-value enforcement; nothing stops a £30 trade order being keyed. Options: publish the minimum and enforce it by eye (works until a temp takes an order), or use an order tool that enforces a per-tier minimum at entry time. Per-tier matters, because distributor minimums are usually higher than standard trade minimums.
5. Invoicing and payment status
Retail orders arrive paid; trade orders often do not — proforma, 30-day terms, payment on collection. Within Linnworks you can create an order without payment and mark it paid later, and invoice templates can be customised per sub-source, so a trade invoice can carry your terms rather than a retail receipt layout. What Linnworks is not is a credit-control system: no credit limits, no statements, no aged-debt view. Keep proper terms tracking in your accounts package and treat Linnworks as the order and stock record; trying to make it do credit control ends badly.
The honest scorecard
- Native and solid: sub-source separation, manual orders, mark-paid-later, per-sub-source invoice templates, stock control across both sides of the business.
- Workable but fragile: trade pricing via spreadsheets or hand-maintained extended properties; minimums by policy; phone orders through the standard manual order screen.
- Needs an app: formula-driven tier pricing synced to Linnworks, customer-to-tier assignment, enforced per-tier minimum order values, and a fast trade counter screen.
The pattern worth copying regardless of tooling: keep the single source of truth inside Linnworks (sub-sources, extended properties, one cost price definition) and let apps compute and enforce, never hoard, your data. That way any app you adopt is replaceable, and any report you build today still works if your tooling changes next year.
Sequence matters too. Get sub-sources right first, then fix your cost prices, then formalise trade pricing, and only then automate order entry — automating a broken price list just produces wrong invoices faster.
The pricing half of that stack is coming very soon. B2B Price Tiers gives you unlimited named tiers driven by cost-up or RRP-down formulas, attractive rounding, a bulk-edit grid, customer-to-tier assignment, per-tier minimum order values, and two-way sync that stores every tier price as native Linnworks extended properties — and it plugs straight into Trade Order POS for counter sales. £29.99/month, 14-day trial at launch. Full details at b2b-prices.mcp-g.com — register your interest today.